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NAINConnect 2008 Workshops |
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Theme: Multifaith Challenges We Face
AS 'INTERFAITH COMMUNITY,' WHO ARE WE?
WORKSHOP SUMMARY
An open discussion about identity questions the ‘interfaith movement’ needs to examine. Terms like pluralism, relativism, and syncretism deserve discussion. Is interspirituality an authentic spiritual path? How does relationship influence our religious/spiritual dialogue? What are the grounds for collaboration? These and other questions will be explored, first on the NAIN2008 website, and then in San Francisco.
PRESENTERS
Don Frew, Bud Heckman, Mary Friedland, and Kay Lindahl (presenter and moderator)
Rev. Bud Heckman, United Methodist, is the editor and co-author of InterActive Dialogue, just pub-lished, one of the first systematic, well-versed books on this core interfaith issue. Formerly the executive director of Religions for Peace-USA, he currently is the Director of Institutional Advancement at Hartford Seminary.
Elder Don Frew, a Wiccan priest, is past President of Covenant of the Goddess, the world’s largest Wiccan organization. He has been an interfaith activist for more than 20 years, including eight years on the Interfaith Center at the Presidio Board of Directors. He has also served on United Religion’s Initiative Global Council and the Religious Assembly of the Parliament of the World Religions since 1993. Projects he has initiated include the “Lost and Endangered Religions Project” and “Sacred Spaces – An International Competition.”
Sister Mary Friedland is a Brahma Kumari who manages the BK’s San Francisco Meditation Center. A teacher and coach, she was Program Officer at the Interfaith Center at the Presidio, during which she managed an Interfaith Festival for the Center. She continues to serve on the Center’s Board of Directors.
Kay Lindahl is the author of books about sacred listening and an interfaith activist who founded Alli-ance for Spiritual Community. She served for a number of years on the United Religions Initiative Global Council. After a term as NAIN’s Chair, she continues on the Board of Directors as Treasurer.
Workshop is interactive - please post a comment and note your interest
DISCUSSION AND COMMENTS
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OPENING STATEMENT
Since the first NAIN Connect twenty years ago, ‘world religions’ for most people has gone from being ‘across the ocean’ to ‘across the street.’ In hamlets and urban centers, we have started to form new relationships, started to share our interests and concerns with people whose religious universe is utterly different than ours. By now, many of us have started conversations about who we are as an emerging interreligious community.
In the Bay Area there are well over 50 interfaith groups. They come in every size and shape. Congregationally based interfaith councils can be found in Alameda, Contra Costa, Livermore, Marin, Napa, Rossmoor, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, and Sonoma. Dialogue groups and sanctuary visitation programs are popular. The region has dozens of interfaith service projects and issue-advocacy groups. Schools, public and private, from kindergarten to post-doctoral studies, are steering towards interreligious departments and curricula. And you’ll hear the same story in Vancouver, Wichita, Toledo, Toronto, Mexico City and a thousand other communities.
Interfaith activists, promoting bridge-building and collaboration, talk about ‘the interfaith movement.’ Not a religion, but a local/global relational community. Not soup, but a salad. Not a simplistic relativism, nor reductionism, but the vitality of people from utterly different backgrounds supporting each other in a Golden Rule-governed agenda.
This spontaneous multireligious community formation is wonderful. And generates a host of questions. Religion is about more than community. Each tradition comes to the table bearing unique theologies, philosophical questions, spiritual practice, and cultural assumptions and values. Sitting together in this unfathomable richness, a thousand questions call for our attention.
We’ve learned some of the requirements in successfully sharing one another’s sacred grounding and religious experience. Mutual respect is critical. Telling our ‘story’ without trying to change the other person is important. Most of us need to hone our listening skills. Each of us has to learn to articulate our own faith and why it is valuable in ways that don’t make others wrong or disrespected.
In the planning stages of NAINConnect 2008, this workshop received more discussion than the others but refused to congeal into a simple description or single subject. We talked about diversity, pluralism, relativism, syncretism, exclusivism, inclusivism, interspirituality, social constructionism, and more. The conversations tend to go on and on and on…
In this workshop and conference, our assumption is that holding the door open to the issues of an emerging interreligious community is overdue, necessary, and healthy. Having these conversations is a precursor to making a difference for goodness sake in an already troubled 21st century.
This blog is dedicated to the continuing dialogue, and you are welcome to take the discussion where you wish as we consider the nature and dynamics of who we are as an interfaith community. What is your question about multifaith or interfaith community?
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| Date |
Author |
Title |
Reply |
| 03/29/08 |
Judy Trautman |
Relationships |
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| I have recently been hearing the word relationships in the interfaith/multifaith context. It really resonates with me.
Dirk Ficca, CEO of the Council for the Parliament of the Worlds Religions, makes a point that tolerance is not a very appropriate goal. If I tolerate you, I imply that I do not like you very much but that I will 'make nice'. Dirk prefers acceptance.
My husband Woody, who founded our MultiFaith Council of NW Ohio, always speaks for mutual respect as a goal.
Tarunjit Butalia at our MultiFaith Banquet spoke of relationship building being the useful work of interfaith groups. I think that is a very apt description of what we are attempting to do in Toledo.
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| 04/04/08 |
Paul Chaffee |
Relationships |
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| Thank you for raising up RELATIONSHIPS as we begin this discussion, Judy.
Father Gerry O'Rourke, whom we fondly call our godfather in the Bay Area interfaith community, has had "relationships, relationships, relationships" as his personal mantra for years now.
The gift of vital, long-term relationships is that they signifiy something larger and more important than our differences. Another NAINConnect 2008 workshop is about a 20-year Christian-Wiccan friendship, which will confound those who say "they" will NEVER get it (whoever the 'they' is at the moment).
Interfaith friendship is powerful enough to heal cultural and racial wounds. It can transcend philosophical and theolgical differences, not ignoring them, but allowing us to l . . .
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| 04/11/08 |
Susan Strouse |
Traditions |
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| I have been wondering for some time about the role of tradition. Paul wrote: "Each tradition comes to the table bearing unique theologies, philosophical questions, spiritual practice, and cultural assumptions and values."
But, while, some people in the interfaith movement insist that one must be grounded in one's own religious tradition, others say that is either not necessary or not possible (some have left a tradition or have never had one). More people seem to be self-identifying as "interfaith" or "interspiritual." What does this mean - to them, to us? What are the implications as we try to talk about our "traditions"?
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| 05/12/08 |
Theodore Timpson |
Spirituality |
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| I have also found a perplexing difference between interfaith dialogue and questions of universal truth. Many teachers have said that all religions lead to the same goal. Many other teachers would disagree! I think people who are ready and willing to perceive unity among religions must have learned to see their own path as metaphorical, pointing beyond itself to something larger. Meanwhile other people remain divided, insisting on the particular truth of their own path, exclusive of others.
What's interesting to me is how much all of these attitudes depend less on one's religion and more on one's inner sense of reality. Is our fate governed by love or by cruel indifference? Does justice require punishment? Am I basically the same as you, . . .
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| 05/31/08 |
Paul Chaffee |
Spirituality |
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| Thanks for your interesting discussion, Theodore.
For me and many others, the issue of universal truth, or the definitation of absolutes, feels like a futile task. One can say, with the Hindus, God is neither this nor that. But giving up a meta-unity doesn't leave us all claiming that our particular truth is one and only truth. Unity versus exclusivism is a false dichotomy, seems to me.
The reluctance to go create a faith that includes all faiths actually has to do with epistemological humility and having seen how much theological attempts at defining the truth for us all have been misguided and even destructive. And if such a unity were to take hold, a million details and understandings and stories would be lost, to all our detrime . . .
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| 07/07/08 |
Bruce Schuman |
Unity / Diversity |
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| Years ago, when we first started doing inter-religious discussion online (on Leonard Swidler's "Interrel" listserv, for example), we were experimenting with a form of "online dialogue". Of course, this written approach lacks many elements of an in-person discussion, and requires a sensitivity to context and intent -- but writing has some advantages. I thought I would try our little method here. We have sent literally hundreds, if not thousands, of email messages in this format. Maybe it can fit in here...
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Susan S: I have been wondering for some time about the role of tradition. Paul wrote: "Each tradition comes to the table bearing unique theologies, philosophical questions, spiritual practice, and cultural assumptions and valu . . .
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| 07/08/08 |
Theodore Timpson |
evolution |
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| Bruce, I like your response approach. I'll be less thorough, but here's mine.
Paul C: The reluctance to go create a faith that includes all faiths actually has to do with epistemological humility and having seen how much theological attempts at defining the truth for us all have been misguided and even destructive.
Bruce S: I agree with this. History gives us many failed examples. And yet -- there seems to be a fundamental and universal human drive towards doing exactly this. Is it some human weakness or innate tendency to prejudice or narrowness? I see the drive towards "syncretism" as an inherent and positive aspect of the human instinct to create solutions, to create answers. It should not be repressed, but instead, be seen as a vi . . .
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| 07/14/08 |
Bruce Schuman |
evolution - co-creativity |
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| I appreciate your response, Theodore. These issues regarding evolution -- of an entire tradition, or of a personal religious interpretation -- are right at the essence of what is emerging today.
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Paul C: The reluctance to go create a faith that includes all faiths actually has to do with epistemological humility and having seen how much theological attempts at defining the truth for us all have been misguided and even destructive.
Bruce S (previously): I agree with this. History gives us many failed examples. And yet -- there seems to be a fundamental and universal human drive towards doing exactly this. Is it some human weakness or innate tendency to prejudice or narrowness? I see the drive towards "syncretism" as an inherent . . .
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| 03/02/09 |
jeremy taylor |
dr. rev. jeremy taylor steals on google |
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| type in google dr. jeremy taylor d.min stole the name, he stole a God spoken protected christians ministry name and wrote and called ministry above copyrights, now kathy taylor has his website in her name, so if rev jeremy taylor lies to you, like he did to me, dont beleive him and tell on him
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| 03/16/09 |
MARK GIBSON |
A NEED TO KNOW |
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| TODAY I HAVE HAD AN EPERIENCE WITH WRITING AND RESEARCH ON QUOTES AND SCRIPTURES FROM 3 DIFFERENT RELEGIONS THIS CAME AFTER I WROTE A PAGE OF SOMETHING I DONT KNOW BUT THIS SEEMS TO BE A GOOD PLACE TO QUESTION MYSELF OR GET COMMENTS TO ALLOW MYSELF TO OPEN UP. AS A JOURNEY BEGINS A LIFE TO UNEXPENDECIES UNKNOWN TO THE FUTURE COMES A DAY WHEN THE FUTURE BECOMES THE PRESENT.FOR EACH STEP CREATES A FUTURE THAT IS TODAY. WE WALK UPON THIS EARTH AS A FORAMTION OF SOUL AND MASS FOR WE HAVE NO ANSWERS TO EXPLAIN THIS PHEONOMINON. WE HAVE A CONSCIUOS THOUGHT PROCESS THAT SEEMS TO UNFOLD AS THE MINUTE PROGRESSES TOWARDS THE HOUR HAND. THIS BEGINS A SERIES OF UNASWERABLE QUESTIONS THAT AT ONE TIME WHETHER TODAY OR TOMMORROW WILL EVE . . .
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